The TikTok Panic & Staying Ahead of the Ever-Changing Digital Space
For the uninitiated, social media can be a treacherous place. We’ve been warned about it for ages.
Navigating the digital landscape requires a multidisciplinary framework and interdisciplinary approach and like most tools, it can be used for good or bad. But don’t be fooled, every single platform has a terrifyingly accurate profile of you and its tracking you in and/or out of its announced perimeters.
Read the fine print.
Take TikTok, for instance. It’s not so different from any other social media platform, except that it’s taking a huge chunk of the market share and spooking the hell out of behemoths such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Netflix, Google, and other social media platforms, streaming platforms, and search engines. Especially with a younger demographic that is no longer interested in TV and older, more established social media sites.
Meta is notorious for either swallowing up the competition or adding features to its platforms that are lifted straight from the competition so its users wouldn’t leave. It worked with Instagram before. If Meta can’t buy them off, it plagiarizes them. It tried to buy Snapchat before it got too big, but since it couldn’t, it copied its Stories instead. The same was attempted with TikTok and, again, since Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t purchase it, Meta’s copying its whole flow, word for word, bar for bar—to the chagrin of many of its users.
As much as many of these tech companies love to talk about innovation, merit, and the free market being kings and queens and that anyone, no matter their status and identities, can play and succeed, many of us aren’t convinced. Most of us don’t have the means nor given the opportunities to compete.
Besides, they’re all working with governments from nations across the world, most times sponsoring politicians outright (by funding both sides of major political parties), to eat at your privacy rights, get astronomical government contracts, and asphyxiate and snuff the competition through very hypocritical but very precise and very effective stratagems. Since they all dump a lot of money on mainstream media (that has the same revolving door as/to Wall St and Main St), they’ll deploy various moral panics to get the public on their side. Some countries ban certain apps and streaming platforms outright. China has banned Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter…. for its own platforms. The United States has done the same with Chinese apps.
There are legit concerns about privacy violations, of course, but all these platforms are doing it one way or another, to different degrees, but all would make you pause if you really paid attention to the intentionally boringly written terms they’re allowing us to access. [That’s not taking into account what they don’t tell us about their discriminatory algorithms and their problematic hiring practices]. Does it make it right? Of course not. They just accuse others of doing it, again, to tarnish the public’s trust in the competition. There are plenty of examples of this (and not just with the tech industry, as many of you know): Trump wanted to ban TikTok, the FCC commissioner wants Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores. Besides bringing to light privacy issues, they activate the biases of vocal bigots and fan the flames of hate and divisions. They’ll try to take out the competition by any means necessary—many means that aren’t necessarily illegal but they for sure are unethical. It’s nothing but crude, pure, unfettered crony capitalism.
To be fair, a foreign entity in possession of troves of data of our identities, behaviors, and whereabouts is completely disconcerting, scary, dangerous, even, but can we trust domestic ones when they’ve been caught red-handed misusing the ones they’ve collected of us? Can we depend on our government to protect us from foreign and domestic bad actors when it’s been caught violating our rights with the help of those same bad actors? Sometimes it throws us a bone by fining these corporations, publicly dressing down their CEOs by some fiery politico who’s either powerless or controlled opposition, feeding us a spectacle with the help of corporate media, but ultimately these fines are just a pittance (that’s included in their quarterly budget) and these penalties are so pitiful that they are laughed all the way to superyachts. Whistleblowers be damned, though, but I digress.
There’s a huge trail of American corporations (and the US government) working with foreign nations that violate the rights of their own citizens and American citizens. Now, ask yourselves, does the government truly care about the rights and well being of its constituents? Above corporate profits? Is that any different in tech, with huge social media platforms?
So why stifle the competition? Obviously, money. Ad money. Right?
There is a lot of money to be made in the digital ad space for social media platforms, ad agencies, and “elite” content creators. Social media and streaming sites and apps usually start out ad-free, counting and depending on social connections and individual creators to bring in and keep users. Some pay well, like YouTube used to, like TikTok relatively does now. But eventually they pull the rug from those who make them huge, like YouTube did for its own programming and corporations with deep pockets that rained money on it to be ahead of the pack. Neither Meta nor Twitter paid creators unless they were hired for a campaign, but they are considering it, albeit, by giving users’ followers the option to fund them themselves.
Eventually, social media platforms start experimenting with ads, like Meta and TikTok did. Meta perhaps has the most data about our demographics and psychographics since so many of us have freely given it our personal information—some understandably required for obvious safety issues but others were mostly acquired through an exploited naïvité on our part—and because we have been using its huge platforms with past anemic competition for a very long time. So does Google, by the way, but it also prioritized websites of large corporations and entities (that spend a pretty penny on its advertising services) on its Chrome browser, threw searches into disarray by placing questionable content ahead of democracy and quality, while allegedly violating numerous anti-trust laws. It supposedly offered some concessions to appease lawmakers, but it’s also working with law enforcement to track its own users. Government agencies have had a nasty history of tracking and targeting citizens that are vocal against their abuses—especially Black activists that are being hunted down till this day.
Facebook has been changing tremendously throughout the years, front and back, once again, to the chagrin of many users, corporations and creators who have spent a fortune trying to build their fanbase. After it told the media and corporations that it would prioritize articles and videos (showed users less and less the people they befriended and the pages they liked), it did a switcheroo to pictures, memes, and cycled back to people, but not without showing users the same tres gatos and prioritizing paid campaigns and now videos, again. The constant changes have been dizzying. All to keep up with the competition. But get this, you have to pay more to reach most of the followers you most likely attained by paying Facebook for them. Organic outreach be damned. Facebook started double-dipping, first for you to gain a follower and then to reach that follower, upsetting corporations and content creators, which pulled back on Facebook ad spending. No wonder young folks are fleeing it.
Twitter, as imperfect as it is, managed to keep a somewhat equitable space for its users without promoted tweets overwhelming its experience, but it has nowhere near the growing number of users as TikTok and its growing revenue. It also allowed questionable and hateful characters to violate its own terms by leaving up their dangerous rhetoric that had a real negative material effect on our lives. All with the pretenses of what they haplessly explained was in the best interest of the public—having access to government representatives and needing hurtful and dangerous language to be extremely specific, without room for misinterpretation and equivocation, but according to their own ambiguous interpretations. Twitter eventually banned our biggest terror, Donald Trump, but it still lets other officials tweet hate speech and dangerous misinformation.
White nationalists decry major social media platforms for having a supposed left-leaning bias, but as you can see, they’re clearly trying to gaslight us. Unfortunately, social media sites keep putting their bottomline above our safety and wellbeing by capitulating to their lies and demands so they can maintain an edge with the competition—to keep as many users as possible so it can sell advertising services by presenting buyers with enticing fantastical impressions for a surgical outreach if only they spend good money on them. Stakeholders love that. Who cares about the safety and rights of the masses?
It goes without saying that all these platforms are deeply antagonistic toward marginalized users and their community standards leave a lot to be desired since they profess to be applied equally throughout but that’s not really the case for Black, Brown people and other disenfranchised groups. What’s worse, and again, in order to appease the cries of conservative blowhards, Facebook, for instance, elevated their content above others even if it violated its terms. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has been rub-a-dubbing with them, having private dinners with Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro. Ex Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, did the same. All because they didn’t want to lose, again, users and profits.
Make no mistake, TikTok has a terrifyingly on point algorithm, but it hasn’t always been friendly to Black and Brown creators. It’s elevated a lot of mediocre personalities at the expense of others. There is a somewhat democratized For You page, but that’s because it knows what you’ll like and what you are more likely to engage. Gen Z and Millenials, along with a sprinkled of older generations, are creating and consuming short but very entertaining and educational content and anyone, for the most part, can go viral. Something that’s more difficult to achieve in other social media sites unless you’re a celebrity, already established, or pay for the outreach. TikTok users tend to be more authentic, letting it all out, sometimes to the point of being a bit too much for its own users, but the idealistic youth appears to be more compassionate and more embracing of others. Ads can be a hit or miss but they’ve brought it six billion dollars in revenue thus far this year. Originally, they were off-putting, but it seems like brands got the memo and are working with content creators to make them more palatable, especially in comparison to the ones promoted in other social media sites.
TikTok is definitely collecting user data. Obviously, for a better user experience and to attract big spenders for its advertising services, but it’s even paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits for selling stolen data to third party entities as well as giving the Chinese government access to it—which includes biometric data such as voice and facial recognition. Something other social media platforms promised to have stopped collecting and using.
Again, a foreign entity in possession of so much information about us is terrifying, but so is a domestic one—especially when they’ve all shown that they can’t be trusted with it. This is no excuse for either, don’t get me wrong. They should all be constantly monitored and held to account, but who can we trust to enforce this when most, if not all, of our influential representatives are sponsored by them? Where do we go to find the whole truth about their flagrant violation of our rights when most, if not all, mainstream media gets money from them? Who watches the watchdogs that go through the same revolving door as those they’re supposedly keeping an eye on?
Unfortunately for us to live, to work, to coexist in this modern world, there’s no way to escape surveillance, no way for us to know that all these powerful entities are constantly policed and penalized for using data that can potentially hurt us when those in charge to protect us are in cahoots with them.
We’re social creatures, no doubt, and we need each other to survive, to thrive. We’ve invented machines and devices to connect, to stay in touch, for good reasons, but the greed, thirst for power, and control of others by certain individuals and entities have corrupted our world. They use those same machines and devices against us.
Our current power structures aren’t working for most of us, but I’m not going to suggest for you to abandon social media and unplug from the rest of the world. I mean, if you can, go right ahead. I suspect most of us won’t be able to. I also don’t want us to succumb to nihilism and fatalism. We shouldn’t let them win.
We can reimagine and recast this hellscape as long as we keep hope alive and fight like hell to upend these asphyxiating systems and make a better world a reality for all of us.
Social media is a tool that has been definitely used for nefarious reasons, but we can also use it for good. There are plenty of examples from good people working within and outside these systems.
We are still here. We can make a difference, but only if we band together, for better or worse, but let’s not go gentle into oppression and extinction.
We don’t have to go out like that.
As long as we are alive, we can dream, we can hope, but most importantly, we can act.
Pónganse las pilas.
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César Vargas is a distinguished writer, advocate, strategist, and social critic, celebrated for his influential voice in modern Latinx America. His insightful social criticism spans a broad spectrum of topics including geopolitics, race, ethnicity, immigration, and culture. His work resonates across various platforms and communities, engaging editors, writers, journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, professors, students, and more.
Recognized as one of the '40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics' by the Huffington Post, his writings have been featured in prestigious publications like the 'Bedford Guide for College Writers' and 'Caribbean Latino Perspectives in the Second Decade of the 21st Century'. His essays and articles have been published and quoted in NBC, Fox News Latino, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, The Huffington Post, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Latino Rebels, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own widely-followed online magazine, UPLIFTT, reaching millions globally.
He is known for creating content that goes viral, thanks to his unique perspective on documenting contemporary issues. His work, which played a pivotal role in bringing Afrolatinidad to the mainstream, is taught in high schools and colleges and shared widely, including in state prisons. His contributions to the arts were acknowledged with two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his short films 'Some Kind of Spanish' and 'Black Latina Unapologetically'.
As a Salinas Scholar at the Aspen Institute's Latinos & Society, he continues to push boundaries and inspire change. His academic background in Film Studies from Queens College, CUNY, underpins his diverse skill set.
Beyond his professional achievements, Vargas is deeply committed to philanthropy. He has raised and distributed funds for various causes, including supporting Haitians in Sosúa, his birthplace. This commitment to social good has piqued the interest of publishing houses, MacArthur Fellows, and major foundation leaders, leading to the ongoing development of his personal memoir.
Currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Delmy, and their son, Omari, Vargas continues to be a dynamic voice and advocate, championing diverse causes and shaping the narrative around Latinx issues in America and beyond.
